Plastics, recycling, and orcas drive environmental policy changes for cities

As session approached, the implications of the decision by China to no longer accept paper and plastic recycling bales from the United States began to take shape. We heard from cities who were making tough choices to cancel recycling programs because they could not ensure that materials would be recycled rather than landfilled due to lack of markets. Three major policy approaches emerged at the Legislature: the re-creation of a statewide recycling innovation center as proposed by Ecology; a plastic product stewardship proposal from recycling advocates; and a proposal from the hauling industry to re-envision the state’s approach to recycling by creating a limited statutory list of what materials are collected for residential recycling.

AWC preferred the stewardship model where the cost and obligation to deal with the proliferation of new types of plastic packaging would ultimately be the responsibility of the manufacturers of those packages, rather than local governments and ratepayers. While this sort of system is in place in Canada and Western Europe, this year the Legislature only felt comfortable passing an interim study (SB 5397) to look at how a program like this could be designed in Washington.

We were very concerned and worked against the hauling industry proposal, largely because it was attempting to undermine existing contracts that were signed in good faith by the industry and their local government clients. We felt that putting a narrow list in statute would not be a long-term positive solution for cities, and that a better way to manage through current challenges was to work collaboratively with industry. The hauling industry proposal died early in the process.

While we had misgivings about the likelihood of success of a new iteration of the recycling center, we did not oppose Ecology’s proposal, which ultimately passed (HB 1543).

The session also saw action on single use plastic bags and single use straws, but neither proposal made it across the finish line. We expect continued legislative activity on those issues.

On the more traditional natural resource issues, the broad suite of activities to protect the state’s Southern Resident Killer Whales advanced through the Legislature. Key issues of note for cities were a long-discussed reform to the state’s hydraulic permitting process, the Hydraulic Project Approval (HPA) statutes. The existing waiver from this permit for bulkheads to protect single family homes was eliminated in HB 1579, and those projects will now need to go through the traditional permitting process. The agency was also provided with “stop work” authority to allow them to shut down construction activities that were flagrantly violating the need to get permits. A final component of the bill was to provide for civil enforcement of HPA violations, which had previously needed to rise to criminal prosecution and were not frequently a priority for county prosecutors to pursue.

In a somewhat surprising move, the Legislature also provided the Department of Ecology with new direction to pursue chemical action plans—detailed strategies to deal with dangerous toxic contaminants that may enter the environment through a multitude of means (think PCBs, PAHs or PFAS). The surprising part is that the agency was given authority in SB 5135 to ban the use of identified, priority chemicals if safer alternatives exist and the ban is necessary to control exposure in sensitive populations. This has been a long-running fight in the Legislature.

Environment & natural resources bills